The SAS product is a huge player in the data science and data analysis market. In my opinion, SAS is one of the six major alternatives for data science: SAS, IBM SPSS, MatLab, R language, Python language, Octave and SciLab.

SAS, SPSS, and MatLab are commercial products. R and Python (with the SciPy library) are open source languages. Octave and SciLab are open source clones of MatLab.

Anyway, I’ve used (and like) all of these tools and it looks like they’ll share the market for the next few years.

The SAS Analytics conference will be held September 12-14 in Las Vegas. I’ll be giving a talk “Prediction Markets using SAS”. I’m looking forward to this event. When I talked to the SAS people recently, they told me they are actively embracing R rather than seeing R as a threat so I want to learn more.

I haven’t been to the SAS Analytics conference in a few years because the dates always conflicted with other conferences. The SAS Analytics will be at the Bellagio — one of my favorite hotels in Las Vegas. Come and see me!